- Tesla is teasing a product reveal for October 7th.
- The teaser video includes what appears to be a spinning fan blade, hinting at a patent it filed earlier this year.
- This could be Tesla’s “epic demo” of the Roadster’s new features.
Tesla dropped a series of Teasers over the weekend, hinting at the release of at least one new product (presumably the low-cost Model Y) on Tuesday. But one of the teasers has some folks spinning, literally, and feels quite out of place for something that Tesla would show off as a feature of the affordable car.
The teaser is for what appears to be a fan. Not the human kind that cheers on Elon Musk, but an actual fan. You know—blades, motor, the whole deal. On its own, it might seem out of place, but with some additional context behind it, it seems pretty likely that we’re about to see Tesla’s long-promised Roadster again with a few extra features.
I know this might seem absurd, but stay with me for a second.
Earlier this year, Tesla filed a patent that would drastically improve downforce on a car using a tightly-guarded industry trick typically reserved for track weapons like the Chaparral 2J, Brabham BT46, GMA T.50 and McMurtry Speirling. All of these cars work like vacuum cleaners, using fans to glue the cars to the pavement by literally sucking the air out from underneath of them.
Tesla’s patent describes a system that employs a fan alongside active aero. The duo work to create a sealed underbody using deployable skirts to generate massive amounts of downforce.
Remember also that when the Roadster was revealed way back in 2017, Tesla made some promises that seemed out of this world: a 1.9-second zero-to-60 time, a 250-mph top speed and a range of 620 miles. That car was supposed to launch by 2020, but it never did. All the while, the hype kept flowing.
Musk eventually upped the ante by saying that the Roadster would deliver a zero-to-60-mph sprint in under a second and described from SpaceX thrusters to achieve unparalleled acceleration and cornering. And while this fan tech might not exactly be a thruster, it seems a lot more likely to make it into production without qualms from regulators.
Nothing here is guaranteed, of course. And while Tesla doesn’t explicitly spell out that the Roadster will be making a fresh debut, it’s hard to deny that the timing lines up quite well. Back in July, Musk promised that Tesla would hold its “most epic demo ever” before the year’s end. And a few months later, Tesla’s VP of engineering, Lars Moravy, quietly confirmed that the demo would involve the Roadster.
Moravy says that the Roadster will be Tesla’s “swan song.” That it will be the “last, best driver’s car” that Tesla ever makes as it refocuses its business models from building cars to autonomy-based solutions, whatever those might actually be.
So on October 7th, we should expect to see the affordable Tesla Model Y officially debut. But it wouldn’t be a Tesla announcement without a “one more thing” moment up its sleeve.
Maybe that one more thing will be something about AI with a Tesla-branded GPU fan. Maybe this “fan” is actually just a Tesla wheel—though the jet-turbine-like sounds accompanying the clip make that seem unlikely. Maybe it will be the Roadster. Either way, we’ll find out whats to come in just a day’s time.
